Television in Japan

• 1. Introduction

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  Television in Japan has its roots not in a broadcast tower or a corporate boardroom, but in a young engineer's laboratory in the mid-1920s. Kenjiro Takayanagi began his research program on electronic television in 1924, and by December 1926 he had done something no one else in the world had managed: he reproduced a recognizable character on a cathode ray tube screen. The character was the Katakana symbol イ, a single stroke of light on a glowing screen. From that moment, Japan was in a race that would shape every living room in the country for the next century.

  What followed was not a straight line. A world war paused everything. An occupation government banned the research outright. And yet, within decades, Japan had introduced color television, pioneered satellite broadcasting, and built the first high-definition television systems ever demonstrated publicly. It also developed the ISDB digital standard now used across Asia and South America.

  How did a country whose television experiments survived war, occupation, and the banning of all research come to lead the world in broadcast technology? And what does a license fee with no legal enforcement mechanism, a golden hour from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m., and a 634-meter tower in Sumida ward tell us about how television actually works in Japan?

• 2. Takayanagi and the First Signals

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  Kenjiro Takayanagi learned about the new field of electronic television from a French magazine before making it the center of his career. He developed a system that, like John Logie Baird's, used a Nipkow disk to scan a subject, but Takayanagi took a different path for display: he used a cathode ray tube to show the received signal rather than a mechanical receiver.

  By 1926, working with a combined mechanical-electronic system, he demonstrated a CRT television with 40-line resolution. At that point it was the first fully electronic television receiver known to work. The following year he pushed the resolution to 100 lines, a figure that remained unmatched until 1931.

  In 1928, his research crossed another threshold. He reproduced an image of a person with 40-line resolution at a refresh rate of 14 frames per second. That same year, he was the first person anywhere to transmit human faces in half-tones on television. By the 1930s, his team had developed a fully electronic system using a revised iconoscope, culminating in a receiver capable of 441 lines at 30 frames per second, the best performance on the market at the time.

  In parallel, the institutional infrastructure was taking shape. The local stations of Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya were merged in 1926 into a single national organization, Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai. Just two years later, four more regional stations came online in Hokkaidō, Tōhoku, Chūgoku, and Kyūshū. In 1930, Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai founded the Science and Technology Research Laboratories, known as STRL, explicitly to develop television technology.

• 3. War, Occupation, and Restart

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  Germany was readying broadcasts of the 1936 Berlin Olympics when Japan's STRL was given a parallel mission: prepare television coverage for the Olympic Games planned for Tokyo. Takayanagi and other leading engineers joined the program. The Tokyo Olympics were officially canceled in July 1938, but television research pressed on, driven by the engineers already invested in the work.

  On the 13th of May 1939, an experimental signal was broadcast from the STRL antenna at the new Broadcasting Hall in Uchisaiwaichō, reaching a point 13 km away. It was the first public television experiment conducted via radio waves in Japan.

  The war interrupted everything. Electrotechnical companies shifted to weapons and ammunition. Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai, which had maintained a degree of independence, became a propaganda arm of the state under military control. After Japan's surrender, the occupation government banned television research in 1945. That ban was lifted in July 1946.

  Takayanagi joined the Victor Company of Japan to continue his own research. NHK resumed its program in November of the same year. The war had delayed regular broadcasting by years, but it had not erased the institutional or technical knowledge that Takayanagi's decades of work had built.

  In 1950, following a reform of the Japanese broadcasting system, NHK became an independent company sustained by a license fee. Commercial broadcasting was opened to private operators at the same time. On the 1st of September 1951, CBC Radio in Nagoya became the first commercial broadcaster to go on air, followed by NJB in Osaka. By 1952, eighteen private radio stations were operating.

• 4. Seventeen Thousand Sets and the Tokyo Tower

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  Regular television programming from NHK began on the 1st of February 1953, with approximately seven hours of broadcast running from 2:00 to 8:45 in the evening. On the 28th of August of the same year, Nippon Television became the first commercial television broadcaster to go on air.

  The two broadcasters immediately competed with different strategies. NHK aimed for culturally elevated programming for the upper social classes; NTV pursued a mass audience. At the end of March 1954, there were only 17,000 subscribers, compared to more than eleven million radio listeners. To address the cost barrier, televisions were installed in city centers, railway stations, and parks, drawing crowds and seeding a television culture that private ownership alone could not yet sustain.

  The crown prince Akihito's wedding in 1959 accelerated the shift. In the year following that broadcast, the number of television sets reached 12 million. On the 1st of August 1959, the Japan News Network was formally established through a syndication arrangement between five KRT-affiliated stations. The last commercial station to sign on in the VHF era was Tokyo Channel 12 in 1964.

  The infrastructure to support all of this broadcasting was growing rapidly. In 1958, the Tokyo Tower was inaugurated, a symbol of the broader economic expansion Japan was experiencing. The tower unified the Kantō region's commercial transmissions, replacing the patchwork of individual antennas each station had been operating. By 1953, there had been only 3,000 television sets in the entire country. Television, the refrigerator, and the washing machine together became markers of postwar Japanese household prosperity.

• 5. Color, Satellites, and HDTV

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  Japan was the third country in the world to introduce color television, after the United States and Cuba. The first color broadcasts began on the 10th of September 1960, using the NTSC standard. The standard was chosen specifically because it allowed color programming to be visible, in black and white, on older sets. Early color programming was limited to foreign films, time-delayed sports, and short educational segments, because the equipment at most stations was not yet adequate for more ambitious production.

  Only 1,200 color units were sold in the first year of color broadcasting. Prices fell gradually: production went from 4,000 units in the 1962-1963 period to 1.28 million in 1967 and over 6.4 million in 1970. By November 1975, Japanese households owned approximately 46 million television sets in total, of which 32 million were color.

  The 1964 Summer Olympics, broadcast from Tokyo, pushed the technology further. The geostationary satellite Syncom 3 carried live television across the Pacific. But the first satellite transmission from the United States to Japan had come earlier, in November 1963, when the Relay 1 satellite carried coverage of the assassination of President Kennedy.

  After the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, NHK's Science and Technology Research Laboratories began work on what would become high-definition television. By 1972, NHK had created a system with 1,125 lines, a 5:3 aspect ratio, and a 60 Hz refresh rate, a substantial improvement over anything the NTSC standard had produced. The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, headed by Charles Ginsburg, became the international authority for testing HDTV systems. In the 1980s, NHK's analog Hi-Vision system, using the MUSE compression system, carried the first high-definition analog broadcasts via satellite. The initial aspect ratio was 5:3 before being upgraded to 16:9.

• 6. The License Fee and Its Limits

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  Every Japanese household that owns at least one television set, or any device capable of receiving live broadcasts, is legally required to hold a television license. The fee funds NHK, the public broadcaster. The amount varies depending on how one pays and whether the household receives only terrestrial broadcasts or also satellite programming. Fees range from 12,276 yen to 21,765 yen, with a reduced range of 10,778 yen to 20,267 yen for households in Okinawa Prefecture. Households on welfare may be excused from the fee entirely.

  What makes this system unusual by international standards is what happens when people do not pay. There is no legal authority to impose sanctions or fines for non-payment. People may discard the bills and turn away the bill collector who occasionally comes to the door, and there is no legal consequence for doing so. Many residents do exactly that.

  This arrangement reflects the broader structure NHK has operated within since 1950, when the occupation forces removed all government and military control over it. NHK became an independent company sustained by listener and viewer fees rather than government allocation or advertising revenue. Commercial broadcasters operate on the opposite side of that divide, financed entirely by advertisers. In Japan's commercial television system, advertisers sponsor programs rather than purchasing time during ad breaks, which gives them substantial influence over prime-time programming and pushes broadcasters toward familiar formats with tested celebrity hosts.

• 7. Going Digital

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  Japan's analog MUSE system was not compatible with new digital standards, which required the country to develop its own digital standard from the ground up. The result was ISDB-T, and the first transmission tests using it began in 2003 in the metropolitan areas of Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya. Digital Terrestrial Television Broadcasting services using ISDB-T started formally in December 2003. By October 2007-27 million HD receivers had been sold in Japan.

  In 2006, the 1seg service launched, allowing users to watch live digital television on mobile phones. The transition from analog to digital proceeded region by region, with most of the country completing the switchover on the 24th of July 2011. Three prefectures, Iwate, Miyagi, and Fukushima, were exempted from that deadline because of the disruption caused by the Tōhoku earthquake; their analog broadcasts ended on the 31st of March 2012.

  The 333-meter Tokyo Tower turned out to be insufficient to cover the Kantō region with a digital terrestrial signal. A second tower was built at 634 meters: the Tokyo Skytree, inaugurated in 2012 in the Sumida ward.

  The complete shift to digital reshaped how programs were distributed. NHK launched its NHK On Demand subscription service in 2008 for online viewing of previously broadcast programs. In January 2014, Nippon TV launched a free service letting viewers watch programs online for up to a week after original broadcast. TBS followed with a similar service in October 2014. In 2015, the main Tokyo-based commercial networks jointly launched the free TVer platform in response to Netflix and Amazon Video entering the Japanese market. The acTVila internet TV portal, formed in 2007 by a consortium of Sony, Panasonic, Sharp, Toshiba, and Hitachi, had already established Japan's first coordinated internet television entry point several years earlier.